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Surveillance - Science topic

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A robbery occurred at a local hardware store, where armed suspects broke in, stole valuable merchandise, and injured two employees. Surveillance footage from the store captures some of the suspects but does not provide clear identification. The police have been called to investigate the crime, and several witnesses, including nearby shop owners and customers, have been interviewed.
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A question has been posted on ResearchGate in a clear attempt by the poster to get other people to do their homework for them.
Should a researcher first warn the poster that they are making a fool of themselves in public, or just walk away quietly?
Discuss.
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A robbery occurred at a local hardware store, where armed suspects broke in, stole valuable merchandise, and injured two employees. Surveillance footage from the store captures some of the suspects but does not provide clear identification. The police have been called to investigate the crime, and several witnesses, including nearby shop owners and customers, have been interviewed.
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Victor Thapelo Swele: As the assigned investigator for this case, my purpose is to gather and analyze all available evidence to identify the suspects involved in the robbery at the local hardware store and ensure they are brought to justice. The primary objective is to review the surveillance footage and witness statements to gather more information about the suspects. Although the footage captures some of the suspects, it doesn’t provide clear identification, so I will focus on looking for distinguishing features or clues that might help. Additionally, I will cross-reference statements from witnesses, including nearby shop owners and customers, to verify consistency and identify any new leads. I will also look for physical evidence, such as fingerprints or stolen items, that could further strengthen the case. One key goal is to understand the full extent of the crime, including the value of the stolen merchandise and the injuries sustained by the employees. By working closely with law enforcement, I aim to piece together the details of the crime and assist in building a solid case against the suspects. Lastly, the goal is to ensure the culprits are identified and held accountable and that the victims receive justice.
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Research Questions
1. What are the regional AMR rates and trends in Ireland?
2. How effective has Ireland’s National Action Plan on AMR (2017–2025) been in mitigating antimicrobial resistance compared to other EU countries?
3. What role do antimicrobial stewardship programs in Irish healthcare settings play in reducing AMR rates, and how do they align with WHO recommendations?
4. How do surveillance systems like EARS-Net and HALT surveys contribute to understanding and managing regional AMR trends in Ireland?
5. What lessons can Ireland learn from the AMR strategies and innovations of other EU nations to enhance its combat against antimicrobial resistance?
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Hello Doc!
Not sure I understand this.
I understand the questions but is this a manuscript you are currently working on?
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How coincidental is das (it's always is with STASI), my 4 bamboo blinds were delivered on SEPTEMBER 4TH. 9 4 - not a good portend in Chinese.
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There is rapid surge of dengue cases in Southern parts of India. However there are no cases till now in the setting I work in Northern India. Besides dengue surveillance and local preventive measures what additional preventive measures be adopted in order to prevent local spread if there is movement in and out in our setting of people across nation
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self protection by usig full sleeve shirt and using mosquito repellent lotions when you are going out
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While checking water supply in field setting , the residual chlorine should last how many hours after supply from source with chlorine added
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That depends on many factors: chlorine dosing rate (ppm), water quality, fouling of water conducts, water temperature, pH and ORP, ... but there should be sufficient residual chlorine after 3 hours HRT between source and point-of-use.
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How can we navigate the ethical challenges of employing AI in surveillance systems for cybercrime prevention, particularly concerning privacy rights? What design principles and safeguards should be implemented to ensure these AI systems do not infringe upon individual privacy while effectively combating cybercrime?
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Navigating the ethical challenges of using AI in surveillance systems for cybercrime prevention involves a delicate balance between enhancing security and protecting individual privacy rights. Here are some design principles and safeguards that could be implemented:
Design Principles:
  1. Minimization: Collect only the data that is necessary for the specific purpose of preventing cybercrime.
  2. Anonymization: Where possible, data should be anonymized to prevent the identification of individuals.
  3. Transparency: Clearly communicate to users what data is being collected and for what purpose.
  4. Accountability: Implement clear policies on who has access to the data and for what reasons.
Safeguards:
  1. Consent: Where feasible, obtain explicit consent from individuals before collecting or processing their data.
  2. Security Measures: Employ robust encryption and other security measures to protect the data from unauthorized access.
  3. Oversight: Establish oversight mechanisms, such as ethics boards, to review and regulate the use of AI systems.
  4. Audit Trails: Maintain logs of data access and processing to ensure traceability and accountability.
  5. Regular Assessments: Conduct regular impact assessments to understand the implications of the AI system on privacy and adjust practices accordingly.
By adhering to these principles and safeguards, AI systems can be designed to respect privacy while still being an effective tool in the fight against cybercrime. It’s also important to stay informed about the evolving legal frameworks and ethical guidelines related to AI and surveillance.
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Como bibliotecólogo, desempeñándome como profesional de apoyo de la Unidad de Bibliometría del CRAI-USTA y estudiante de la Maestría en DIrección y Gestión de Proyectos estoy trabajando en un texto que explore ¿Cuál es la relación existente entre Vigilancia (Tecnológica) e Inteligencia (competitiva), y cuál es el rol de las Unidades de Vigilancia en la gestión de proyectos?
Agradezco sus opiniones y recomendaciones.
As a librarian, working as a support professional of the Bibliometrics Unit of the CRAI-USTA and student of the Master's Degree in Project Management, I am working on a text that explores: What is the relationship between (Technological) Surveillance and (competitive) Intelligence, and what is the role of Surveillance Units in project management?
I appreciate your views and recommendations.
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Think of technological surveillance as keeping an eye on what's happening in the tech world—new inventions, trends, and developments. Now, competitive intelligence is like spying on your competition—finding out what they're up to, what they're launching, and how they're doing things.
Now, how do these relate? Well, technological surveillance helps gather information that can be super useful for competitive intelligence. For example, if you're aware of the latest tech advancements, you can predict how your competitors might use them and stay ahead of the game.
And where do Surveillance Units fit into project management? They're like the secret agents of a project team. They gather intel, analyze it, and provide valuable insights that help make informed decisions. So, in project management, having a Surveillance Unit onboard can be a game-changer—it keeps you informed, helps you anticipate challenges, and ultimately leads to better project outcomes.
Hope this helps!
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I am doing research on internal soil erosion mechanism. ICOLD Bulletins 164 is an important reference material, but I am not an ICOLD member and cannot get the report. I hope you can help me get the report. Thank you very much for your help.
ICOLD Bulletins 164 Volume 1 introduces Internal Erosion of Existing Dams, Levees and Dikes, and their Foundations; Vol. 2
ICOLD Bulletin 164 Volume 2: Case histories, investigations, testing, remediation and surveillance
Best wishes
zhangbuping
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How much efficient is the thick in thin smear in surveillance of malaria particularly if the high-risk individual is asymptomatic?
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Peripheral blood film (PBS) has limitations in malaria diagnosis. The malaria parasite (plasmodium) has a life cycle that goes through a mosquito and man. There is a stage in the human body when the plasmodium is predominantly in the liver, and therefore may not be seen in blood smears.
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  • Antimicrobial resistance refers to the ability of microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites, to resist the effects of antimicrobial drugs, such as antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and antiparasitic drugs. AMR is a global public health concern as it can lead to treatment failures, increased healthcare costs, and higher morbidity and mortality rates.
  • AMR surveillance involves monitoring the occurrence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in different settings, including healthcare facilities, communities, and animal agriculture. It aims to collect data on resistance patterns, identify emerging resistant strains, and track the effectiveness of antimicrobial treatments over time.
  • In Pakistan, like in many other countries, AMR surveillance plays a crucial role in understanding the extent and impact of antimicrobial resistance. By collecting and analyzing data on resistance patterns, healthcare professionals and policymakers can make informed decisions regarding treatment guidelines, infection control practices, and antibiotic stewardship programs.
  • In recent years, there have been efforts to strengthen AMR surveillance in Pakistan. The National Antimicrobial Resistance Action Plan (NAP) was launched in 2017 to address the growing threat of AMR in the country. The plan aims to improve surveillance systems, promote rational use of antibiotics, strengthen infection prevention and control measures, and enhance public awareness about AMR.
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AMR represents a major threat to human health with significant global economic and security implications. In 2015, WHO Member States unanimously approved a Global Plan of Action to tackle AMR. Subsequently, Heads of States endorsed the AMR Action Plan and called for concerted action across all sectors in the context of the One Health approach.In the span of four years, 91 countries and territories have enrolled in GLASS and this report presents AMR data in over two million patients from 66 countries. It shows disturbing high rates of resistance among antimicrobials frequently used to treat common bacterial infections.
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Any link will also be helpful.
Thank you
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I can offer you a software that enables designing two panels in a single step. However, please note that the program requires familiarity with Linux. It should be noted that this software has demonstrated excellent performance and efficiency in designing panels for eight and thirty viruses, using sequences exceeding 40,000 and 300,000, respectively.
Good luck!
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Weather and climate conditions significantly impact the incidence and geographical distribution of several diseases. Extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods, and droughts alter disease transmission ecologies and population vulnerability, thereby influencing risk for climate-sensitive disease. For example, increased temperature and rainfall induced by climate change and extreme weather events (such as storms or cyclones) are projected to increase the risk of malaria due to a greater geographical range for the Anopheles mosquito vector, a longer season, and enhanced vector breeding and disease transmission rates. Risk monitoring and mitigation strategies are therefore importance to preserve the health of populations.
Developing integrated surveillance can greatly enhance the capacity of health systems to prepare and adapt to climate-sensitive diseases. Integrated surveillance involves the integration of multiple surveillance systems (e.g. disease surveillance and weather surveillance) to improve the use of information for detecting, investigating and responding to public health threats. This integration of data, therefore, improves the flow of surveillance information throughout the health system.
Importantly, climate-informed surveillance can enhance the preparedness of health systems via early warning systems. Early warning systems aim to anticipate risks and trigger early warning responses to avoid or reduce impact and prepare for effective response. In the context of a rapidly changing environment and risk landscape, early warning systems are a valuable tool for building the adaptive capacity and climate-resilience of health systems.
The field of environmental communication teaches that how we communicate about our environment shapes not only what we think about it, but most importantly, what we do about it. Or as Greta Thunberg is the latest to remind us, what we don’t do about it.
How we frame our communication matters. Framing is positioning messages in ways that draw on audiences’ mental models to favour specific perspectives on an issue.
source: Climate Change and Health (who.int)
Climate change or climate crisis? It’s all in the framing | Canada's National Observer: News & Analysis
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Videos may not be the first two of choice. Do you surveillance may serve to follow farm and wild animal behaviour, evacuation routes, beaches (tsunami), forests (fires) et cetera
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Micro drones are increasingly used in Ukraine for surveillance and offensive operation by both parties (Russia and Ukraine). What are some of the techniques used in identification and neutralization of micro drones? Micro drones could be military made or Commercial of the shelf drones used for military purposes. Thanks
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Counter-drone TTPs are dependent on the drone system and are largely a function of range. If we're talking about micro-drones, I've seen Army units use countermeasures as simple as a shot gun. But with the constantly improving cameras, even micro-drones have sufficient stand-off to make shot guns ineffective.
One promising piece of kit that I've seen recently is the L3 Harris Vampire which is being sent to Ukraine later this year. Other surface to air systems like the SA-8 and the German made Gepard have been effective against the Iranian made Shahed 136. These two SA systems may also be effective at identifying Russian micro-drones but may not be cost effective.
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I am an upcoming researcher and this is going to be my first research. My research involve that why all countries preferably India are extensively building up a swarm of drones in every field like agriculture, fire fighting, surveillance , etc.
Please suggest me that whether this topic is valid or not and how to approach towards it .
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Drone Industry in India: Impact of New Rules 2021 - GreyB
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There are news on COVID-19 outbreak on ship, no matter cruise or military one.
And few aircraft carriers are also involved.
What is special about the ship arrangement that facilitated all these?
Nature 580, 18 (2020)
Limiting spread of COVID-19 from cruise ships - lessons to be learnt from Japan,
QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, , hcaa092,
COVID-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship: estimating the epidemic potential and effectiveness of public health countermeasures,
Journal of Travel Medicine, , taaa030,
Public Health Responses to COVID-19 Outbreaks on Cruise Ships — Worldwide, February–March 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2020;69:347-352. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6912e3
Estimating the asymptomatic proportion of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, Yokohama, Japan, 2020.
Euro Surveill. 2020;25(10):pii=2000180.
Chest CT Findings in Cases from the Cruise Ship “Diamond Princess” with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
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Have a look at this useful RG link for insights.
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As part of my fellowship, I want to evaluate the oral health surveillance system as part of my fellowship. I already read CDC's guidelines for evaluating surveillance systems, but I am still confused about how to assess one. Does anyone have examples of work or reviews done for this type of evaluation?
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Dear Mendiore
CDC guideline have 9 component of evaluation. Some.of these are quantitative like Sensitivity, PPV and data Quality. So these are easily calculated. However some of the indicator are qualitative. Which are to be ascertained through interview of related stake holders.
We have used CDC guideline these are easy and friendly to use. I will share you my evaluation report which have all these CDC guideline indicators of evaluation of public health programs.
Please mail me on drsandeepguriro@gmail.com
Thanks
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I'm looking for a database that contains unedited surveillance style videos of crimes occurring. I will be using Video Data Analysis to answer various questions about the crimes, so all types of crimes are welcome. I've use YouTube and similar sources in the past but there are methodological issues with this technique and limited sources.
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I found some of what I was looking for:
UCF-Crime dataset is a new large-scale first of its kind dataset of 128 hours of videos. It consists of 1900 long and untrimmed real-world surveillance videos, with 13 realistic anomalies including Abuse, Arrest, Arson, Assault, Road Accident, Burglary, Explosion, Fighting, Robbery, Shooting, Stealing, Shoplifting, and Vandalism. These anomalies are selected because they have a significant impact on public safety. This dataset can be used for two tasks. First, general anomaly detection considering all anomalies in one group and all normal activities in another group. Second, for recognizing each of 13 anomalous activities. Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos Waqas Sultani, Chen Chen, Mubarak Shah IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018
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Regarding the animal trapping, such as rats:
1) How to calculate the number of animals that are used for disease surveillance study? Is it based on the size of the sampling location or other factors?
2) Is the calculation of sample size for roaming animals different if the animals are on the ground, at sea or in the air?
Thank you.
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Hey Reena L Richard , here is a very basic and intuitive guide to responsible sample size calculation. It might be of help for you to answer very basic questions about your project before calculation the sample size. Feel free to reach out with any specific questions!
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Hello
I have to realize a deep learning model (with tensorflow and open cv) and connect it to a surveillance camera to detect non conform products in a company.
It's my first project and I'm lost, I don't know where to start and where to get a good database (knowing that I've been asked to make a standard model that can be used for any kind of product).
I need your advice to guide me, or if you can recommend tutorials that can help me.
Thanks in advance
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How can I get the most related work on this area, as you know, One Health is a comprehensive and multisectoral approach to assess and examine the health of animals, humans and the environment and I want to include in this review Priority of Pathogens in Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance in Veterinary (Animal), Human and Environmental sample from a One Health approach is discussed. GLASS priority pathogens include Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Salmonella spp. and Shigella spp., were also. so, pls share your experience in it!
Regards all!
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tHK ALL!
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Can someone please help me with how I can incorporate Surveillance security system and Smart Grid.Any suggestions would be immensely helpful.Thanks
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Intresting questions
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In connection with the development of cybercrime, should the surveillance of citizens by national security services be developed, expanded, increased?
To what extent can the developed range of citizens' surveillance be improved as part of the improvement of national cyber security systems?
As part of the improvement of cyber security systems, should the services for combating cybercrime be able to surveillance the entire activity of citizens on the Internet?
Are legal norms regulating the issues of cyber security, services for combating cybercrime and data security gathered in Big Data database systems of large online technology companies fully adapted to the rapidly growing ICT and Internet technology?
Please reply
Best wishes
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Most citizens are unaware of how much information about Internet users is possessed by Internet technology companies that offer certain information services on the Internet.
Best regards,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
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I'm looking for benchmark datasets for kidnapping detection from surveillance cameras. Are there any good datasets that could help me with achieving this?
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The poor surveillance is a very big problem in chilgoza forest regeneration, and there is a huge difference between root and shoot growth (R/S) Ratio this might be a reason? how we can increase shoot growth?
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You know Chilgoza pine is one of those species that grows in harsh environmental conditions and it produces a deep root system that is why it evolved in harsh conditions. Producing a deep root system is one of the strategies to grow in harsh environmental and edaphic conditions. I think the low survival rate in artificial regeneration is damaging of the root system and unfortunately, we don't care much about the root system. In the nurseries, we can improve shoot growth maybe with fertilizers application and other provisional practices.
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There is an established system for reporting of adverse events following immunization (AEFI) applicable for vaccines in universal immunization programme in India. Is there a similar surveillance system for reporting adverse events of COVID-19 vaccines ? Is the VigiFlow system (https://www.who-umc.org/global-pharmacovigilance/vigiflow/about-vigiflow/) recording COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in India ?
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The prcedures used after the infrastructure come concers about how well adverse events following immunization are being tracked ,reported,recorded and investigated by the the Goverment,experts told Indiaspend.
Rference:www.bloombergquint.com.
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Hi all!
I am working on a project named Image Captioning, and I want to use its applications like Visual Question Answering in the areas of Security and Surveillance, how it will help to manage large amounts of surveillance data effectively, to bring a big change in security measures. Are there any suggestions or research papers available for that? Please suggest.
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Does anyone know if there are recent study about plant pathogenic fungi or invasive fungi surveillance? Such as sudden oak death or other important fungi.
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This is an excellent surveillance study on deadly wheat blast disease in Bangladesh. Hope it will be useful to you.
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we are doing an assessment of communicable disease surveillance system in our region, there are nearly 300 health facilities (primary health care centers and hospitals), I would like to select a number of health facilities to ask them about the communicable disease surveillance system, How can I calculate the number of health facilities that I should choose to perform this study.
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If I have rightly construed, you wish to conduct study from PHC & Hospitals. For proper representation, multistage sampling would be appropriate in which PHC, CHC, secondary care & tertiary care hospitals as health institutions. So, state, district, block & sector wise systematic random sampling could be considered which would represent PHC CHC & hospitals.
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I am making use of a multiphase mixed-methods study to develop, implement and evaluate an injury surveillance system.
In the first study, I am making use of an exploratory sequential design, where the participant's perceptions (qualitative approach) will be used to build a context-sensitive framework, through which quantitative data (weekly survey) about injury rates can be captured (second study). Since the quantitative part is a longitudinal study, collecting data from the same population, I am also analysing the end-users engagement with the system, based on the weekly response rate.
At the end of this, I will be evaluating the surveillance system as a practical tool for end-users through qualitative data (third study). This will be done by analyzing response rates from the prior quantitative study and identifying a purposeful sample of participants based on their response rates and their engagement with the system.
Now, the question is, should I call this design a sequential explanatory one? I am confused as I am only using one outcome (weekly engagement) from the second study and trying to explain it through qualitative means.
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It sounds you basically have a three-step design: qual --> QUAN --> qual. Such designs are quite reasonable but relatively rare. Hence, it does not have a standard name, but you might all it "an intervention study that includes both exploratory and explanatory components within a mixed methods framework."
My book on "Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods" includes a chapter on three-step designs.
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hello,
I want to ask you about 4 best cameras used in surveillance in VTOL drones (days/ and night), thank you so much.
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Sony Alpha 7R IV
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Locally derived surveillance data to track resistance patterns and better understand the burden of AMR on patients there.
Observations from minned resources now show that Pfizer Inc sponsored Antimicrobial Testing Leadership and Surveillance (ATLAS) is an online platform that provides widespread access to data on both emerging bacterial and fungal resistance patterns.
This is supporting Public health and invariably steps that backup health promotion
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Great, nice information...
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With the daily updates on COVID-19 cases and deaths, I am trying to understand the algorithm behind the assignment of the cause of death.
I was wondering how doctors evaluate and assign the cause of death?
E.g. if someone has a heart attack, following COVID-19 infection (while they are infected - not post recovery) and this person had metabolic syndrome (let's say all dyslipidemia, hypertension and hyperglycaemia) how to we make a decision if the cause death is COVID-19 or diabetes or cardiovascular disease?
To me the guideline given for the assignment of COVID-19 death in Australia seems to have an inherent bias towards COVID-19:
"As per the COVID-19 national guidelines, a COVID-19 death is defined for surveillance purposes as a death in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID19 (e.g. trauma)."
But I actually do not wish to restrict my question to COVID-19. Instead, I am trying to understand in general how we calculate mortality rates for different diseases, as these numbers inform policy and how funds are allocated.
Especially for complex metabolic conditions, like cardiometabolic ones, how do we decide if someone with type 2 diabetes, and vascular damage potentially due to hyperglycaemia, that had a stroke, will be assigned to the diabetes deaths toll or to the cardiovascular deaths toll?
How does e.g. WHO come up with:
9.5 million deaths from heart attack per annum
6 million deaths from stroke per annum
2 million deaths from diabetes per annum
Is there a guideline given to doctors regarding a decision-roadmap to assign the cause of death?
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How to assign cause of death during the COVID-19 pandemic era?
Because of early over-reporting and under-reporting of deaths assigned to COVID-19 early during the era of this pandemic, now there has been guidelines that may help. However, to assign as particular event as a cause of death due to COVID-19, autopsy is the best method, a practice more recommended than actually done. The challenges in doing post-mortem studies during the COVID-19 stem from problems with logistics, availability of experts, and fear of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 due to issues supplies of the required PPE around the world.
1. Correctly certifying deaths due to COVID–19: guidance for physicians
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1. Where can you find surveillance data of Non-communicable data of different countries?
2. What types of research/study design are usually done in this case?
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Try WHO global observatory
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May I offer my posit. SARS-COV-2 may have some part which is immuno-antigenically similar to some component of human makeup, resulting in this autoimmune state. This may also be related to the Hypercytokine Storm we are seeing in adults, again, over-reaction of the immune system to the virus. I dare say I am old enough to be able to compare this to the Scarlet Fever/Rheumatic Fever days, leading to cardiac valvular attack by a similar reaction of autoimmunity, stimulated by hyperactivity of the immune system to antigenically similar infectious particles. Thank you. Gary Ordog, MD. In response to the following:
COVID-19
MAY 15, 2020
-Rapid risk assessment: Pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome and SARS -CoV-2 infection in children
-The ECDC has published a Rapid Risk Assessment on pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome and SARS -CoV-2 infection in children.
-According to ECDC, several countries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic recently reported cases of children that were hospitalized in intensive care due to a rare pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome (PIMS). The presenting signs and symptoms are a mix of the ones for Kawasaki disease (KD) and toxic shock syndrome (TSS) and are characterized, among others, by fever, abdominal pain and cardiac involvement. A possible temporal association with SARS-COV-2 infection has been hypothesized because some of the children that were tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection were either positive by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or serology.
-The ECDC noted that about 230 suspected cases of this new pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome temporally associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection (PIMS-TS) have been reported in EU/EEA countries and the UK in 2020, including two fatalities- one in the UK and one in France. These cases are being further investigated.
-"So far, epidemiological studies have shown that children appear to be less affected by COVID-19. Only 2.1% of all laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases reported to The European Surveillance System (TESSy) were in the age group between 0 and 14 years of age", the agency stated.
-The ECDC also added that an association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and this new clinical entity of multisystem inflammation has not yet been established to date, although an association appears plausible. The ECDC assessed the risks as follows:
-The overall risk of COVID-19 in children in the EU/EEA and UK is currently considered low, based on a low probability of COVID-19 in children and a moderate impact of such disease.
-The overall risk of PIMS-TS in children in the EU/EEA and the UK – is considered low, based on a very low probability of PIMS-TS in children and a high impact of such disease.
-"While the clinical management of these children has absolute priority, data collection from EU/EEA Member States and the UK would strengthen the body of knowledge for this rare condition and allow for a better analysis of these cases. An analysis of surveillance data could clarify the incidence of KD/PIMS and identify the most affected age groups and risk factors for both conditions", the ECDC noted.
-ECDC has agreed with the EU/EAA Member States and the UK to include PIMS as a possible complication to be reported for EU-level COVID-19 surveillance. According to the agency, research efforts should aim at determining the role of SARS-CoV-2 in the pathogenesis of PIMS-TS and answering other significant remaining questions.
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Interesting
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How to obtain data sets for research (database) on the monitoring of mechanical vibrations and electrical faults of a synchronous generator or motor?
Comment obtenir des ensembles de données pour la recherche (base de donnée) sur la surveillance des vibrations mécaniques et les défauts électrique d'une générateur ou moteur synchrone ?
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Dear Billel Meghni , this is a very good question, I have myself not been able to figure out...
I basically agree with the answers from Chouaib Chakour and Pavlo Krot . Let me just add you can found lots of very useful and informative material concerning reliability and vibration/condition based monitoring of electric motors, generators, and other machines in specific national contexts, e.g. nuclear or thermal power plants. I can certainly recommend taking a deeper look at the websites of these organisations:
- Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) - United States
- Energieforsk - Sweden
I hope this helps. You can contact me back if you need help.
Best regards
Maurizio
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Generative Adversarial Networks answered my questions.
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Not in all time
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After this Covid-19 crisis, our next relevant challenge will be a global surveillance network involving "VETERINANS" and "ANIMAL BIOLOGISTS" to MONITOR, and possibly to predict, potential sources of another highly pathogenic Covid. It will be necessary to prepare a "PLATFORM " to facilitate scientific exchange across disciplines (Large BrainStorming) , sharing of data, old and recents resultats of resarch, and coordinated efforts to prevent future Sanitary CRISIS.
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Veterinarians may contribute in research for finding the vaccine as they have already experienced in finding the vaccines for many Corona viral diseases in domestic animals
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Immune mechanisms play an integral role in tumor growth establishment and metastases. Immunoediting is a dynamic process which contributes to immuno surveillance to keep under control It is made up of three phases: 1) elimination, 2) equilibrium, and 3) escape.
1. Elimination: Most immunologically vulnerable tumour antigens may eliminate by elimination phase immune editing as host’s immune system is capable of recognizing these cells
2. Equilibrium: However, constant division can generate tumour cells with reduced immunogenicity that can evade the immune elimination because of the genetic instability. This state of production of new tumor cell variants balanced by the distraction has been dubbed “equilibrium”, during which the cancer cells continue to divide, accumulating mutational changes by chance or in response to immune-induced inflammation.
3. Escape: These processes gradually come to a situation where tumours are capable of reducing the capacity of the immune system, to eradicate them by achieving immune suppressive effects or by loss of target antigen expression. Consequently tumour escapes from immuno surveillance and progression of carcinogenesis will occur. Nonetheless, there may be conditions under which tumor cells are truly dormant, for example by induction of “senescence”. In this case, they would be likely to remain dormant permanently, as replicative senescence is generally believed to be irreversible.
Microbiome studies based on ‘omic’ technologies have provided the laboratory evidence on disease associated in metabolic diseases and cancer (non infectious origin). These microbes especially bacteria are the most metabolically versatile organisms in the world, which can adopt to any environment, even changing their genetic potential, using mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer. Thus cancer associated microbiome dominated by inflammaphilic periodontopathogens can be found in OSCC tumour micro environment.Furthermore, in-vitro experiments have provided substantial information on carcinogenicity of P. gingivalis and F. nucleatum.
I would like to start a meaningful discussion on immune responses of the host to 'cancerbiome induced inflammation' which can retard the 'immuno surveillance ' in oral carcinogenesis. For an example , retardation of 1st and 2 nd steps in immuno editing, which may cause immuno suppression, where tumour could escape from immuno surveillance. For an example well known periodonto pathogens such as P. gingivalis or F. nucleatum., how they can contribute to immuno suppression of the host which may lead tumour cells to escape from immuno surveillance ?
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It's just a matter of combining information in the article 'The Microbiome of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinomas: a Functional Perspective' with the other article 'New insights into cancer immunoediting and its three component phases — elimination, equilibrium and escape'
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I'm currently employing a sequential mixed-methods approach, including an initial exploratory phase and a final explanatory phase. The initial phase is a qual -> QUANT, with the primary aim to understand the context of the stakeholders so as to design a context-specific surveillance system. The second phase is the collection of data through quantitative means and explaining it through the qualitative findings from the initial part, in other words integrating qualitative and quantitative findings. The third phase, i.e. the evaluation phase is a quant-> QUAL.
the question is: should I make use of a dialectic perspective, i.e. constructivism and post-positivism under the heading of pragmatism or should I explain this primarily from a pragmatism point of view, without considering the multiple paradigms?
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Creswell is not an expert on paradigms, and his advice is likely to cause you trouble if someone wants to know how you used constructivism as a basis for posts-positivism and vice versa. In any event, this statement does not say anything about a "dialectical perspective."
If you want to stay out of trouble in addressing this topic, pragmatism is the safer choice.
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Do you think, one day the technology will be developed by which each and every single human being can be monitored continuously without any device with them; just sensing their DNA barcode? Their location, activities, temperature, wellbeing, etc.
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How does fingerprints work with remote sensing and DNA Barcodes?
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Dear all
After reading the book "The age of surveillance capitalism" seems evident that big data will influence our decisions in the close future (if it is not already happening). According to this reality, it seems that the classical approach of segmentation will no longer be useful.
I would like to know your opinion about this
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It is useful to better understand customer needs and allocate marketing finance effectively.
The potential importance of Big data is growing. Nevin Hammam
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I am currently designing an intervention (injury surveillance system) to be implemented within an organization. This research (following a pragmatic paradigm) will follow a multiphase mixed methods research consisting of QUAL -> QUANT -> QUAL.
The initial qualitative part will be conducted through interviews with the stakeholders of the organization in order to understand their perspectives with regards to the intervention; to identify barriers and facilitators to implementing the intervention and to design the intervention that best fits with the organizational needs.
My question is this: I am not sure which qualitative approach do I have to consider in this first part of the study. I am approaching this study from a pragmatic world view and hence I do not know whether this part requires a specific qualitative approach.
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I agree with David L Morgan and Dean Whitehead that the most important thing to define is why you choose Pragmatism as the paradigm for your research. For example, I also conducted a multiphase mixed methods design for my doctoral research, which included an intervention. But while Pragmatism was the umbrella paradigm for the overall design of my research (w/ 4 research phases in total), the different phases of my project adopted different paradigms. For instance, whereas the phases with a QUAL priority adopted a constructivist stance, the ones with a QUAN had pragmatic stance.
The reason why I adopted pragmatism as the Overarching umbrella was precisely because one of its fundamental principles was paradigm integration, i.e. the synthesis of quantitative and qualitative standpoints. In short, the eclectic of pragmatism partners well with the multidimensionality of mixed methods multiphase designs, by allowing us the allocation of different paradigms along the different research phases of multiphase designs.
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Self-treatment or over the counter drugs. is use of medication without consulting a physician either for diagnosis, prescription, or surveillance of treatment.
The most widely self-medicated substances are over-the-counter drugs used to treat common health issues at home. It involves obtaining medication without prescription and taking medicines on advice of and from friends and relatives.
Is self -medication illegal or at least an incorrect method of treatment?
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A safe drug in this moment may be announced harmful in next yeas after more researches!
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Data and accessibility services for persons with disabilities
Many people have privacy concerns particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, I think people's privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount.
People must know for which purpose data is used and weigh the benefits that providing their data may offer them. When these benefits are of immediate personal relevance e.g. accessibility, medical, access services, I think most people are willing to share their data.
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"How important is the sharing of personal data for persons with disabilities?" is a complex question.
Data, I believe can be categorized into three classes.
1 - Personal (The stuff I don't want others to see),
2 - Private (The stuff that's okay to share with some others - Groups),
3 - Public (The stuff anyone can view).
Having a disability can make this modern age more difficult to navigate.
Many disabled people(s), Myself being one of them, have a handicap (for lack of better words) that restricts them from living average digital life. Whether having a physical or mental disability governs how easily it is for them to pickup new technology, understand it, and/or drive it to the next level, and is greatly influenced by current technologies, finance, and their abilities to assimilate technology. Not without saying, this is in vast contrast to the non-disabled that take these issues for granted.
It is very important to me (Being a physically disabled middle aged man), for me to be able to access and share my ideas and knowledge, as well as be able to access knowledge of new or old Technology, that makes our lives more complex every day as technology grows. However, this forces us into an everlasting upward slope to take in these technologies. Not just to understand how to use them (Which makes our lives easier and harder at the same time), but to also understand how to fix them. It is hard enough for the older generation that have no understanding of new technologies (Which they would rather it stay that way, and is a disability in it's own right), but to have other disabilities makes it more necessary for disabled individuals to share and access data across a wide variety of mediums, than not.
Further, disabled people often have their disability get in the way of doing average every day things, let alone having to understand new technologies that can be challenging without a disability being involved, in it's own right.
So, I believe the question should be:
How important is the protection of and security from, and for them to be, in relation to them; sharing of personal data for persons with disabilities, and the aging?
After all, senior citizens are constantly being phished, smished, and duped into giving out their credit cards and social security numbers among other sensitive details that are needed to access financials. And the aging do not understand that simply telling someone your dog's name, to a hacker can be very dangerous if your password is your dog's name.
This age of technology gets more complicated each and every day. We struggle just to have a comprehensive working knowledge to be able to work with it. Disabilities get in the way of carrying groceries to my car, let alone trying to access E-mail when my sciatic nerve is acting up. We either adapt and overcome, or we are left by the way side of this amazing modern lifestyle intertwined with technology, even when we do not see it.
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My research work focused on Multi moving swarm robot based moving object detection and tracking for intelligent video surveillance. I need some excellent papers which are related to Multi moving object detection and tracking for multiple swarm robots.
Keyword: Multi camera multi moving object detection and tracking.
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I recommend reading the following paper :
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Hello - Can anyone tell me how many reported cases of Zika were recorded in 2018 and 2019 thus far? I can't seem to find this information anywhere!
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In general, RGB cameras are using for surveillance purpose. With the advancements in sensor technology, cost effective depth sensor like Kinect are available in the market. Can we use them for surveillance purpose?
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Basically you can use whatever you like (cameras, PIR sensors, ...). It's more or less a question of your surveillance objectives.
So, if using a Kinect is advantageous, why not. (Although, IIRC, the useable area of depth measurement is quite limited.)
Hope this helps ...
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Despite the advantages of the transdisciplinary interaction between scientists through Research Gate questions is obvious, and answers are almost always polite and scientifically sound, the risk of flaws and non-scientifically proven arguments is still there. Is the Research Gate community the one obliged to contain inappropriate approaches or rather RG must take an active role on it?
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following
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Having been involved in biomarker-based studies in Bangladesh & S. Africa, I am interested in the methods you are employing, please, including the overall design of the surveillance programme.
Many thanks!
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I am interested to explore some good applications of computer vision(other than surveillance ) in smart buildings. Any comments please.
regards
Nadeem
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In spite of several campaigns and infinite awareness activities, water wastage is still an avid problem. In countries like India especially in its rural areas, this problem imposes a great threat.
Is it possible to retrieve information relevant to this from the satellite image data and use it to build a systematic surveillance system for this?
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If you are willing to pay the costs for high resolution imagery like Worldview or Ikonos repeatedly, it certainly is possible at an excruciating amount. With opensource image its really difficult because of the coarse resolution. You can try using Sentinel-2 which is 10m to may be monitor the drainage systems. But the problem is in the rural areas these are very narrow and would not even comprise a single pixel on certain occasions. The best would be to use UAVs for monitoring, it wouldn't require a very sophisticated sensor so you could manage your budget also.
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dear fellow researchers,
I am working with person recognition in outdoor surveillance. I ve one doubt that can i use local binary pattern feature for person recognition in outdoor environments .
please let me know
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Of course you can do it. But, it is better to combine LBP features with some of the morphological or shape features to evaluate better performance.
It is important to apply LBP on which part of a person image(just face, face and body, etc)
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Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is a key avionics technology used for aviation cooperative surveillance (i.e., aircraft separation assurance and collision avoidance). However, the absence of adequate security features makes this system vulnerable to a number of cyber-physical threats (jamming, spoofing, meaconing, etc.). What technological solutions can be introduced to address this challenge?
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Dear Charles,
Thank you very much for your message and for the valuable documents. I am also very actively involved in this line of research. A recent paper on GNSS performance threats and augmentation strategies in aviation was recently published in JPAS (for convenience, the link is provided below):
In addition to addressing GNSS issues, it would be nice working together and investigating the feasibility of specific safety features that could be included in the ADS-B data-link as well.
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I am currently doing a project for a government who wish to introduce the use of body cameras among their labour inspectors and health & safety inspectors when conducting visits to business premises. They are thinking of combining this with the use of GPS so that the camera automatically switches on when the inspector reaches the business and automatically switches off when he/she leaves the business. Does anybody know of any research on the impacts of the usage of such body cameras, such as in related areas (e.g., policing)?
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Critical security scholars has done some very interesting stuff relating to the (b)ordering of different places and spaces - also in terms of the public/private divide in surveillance. Don't know if it useful, but Maria Stern and Joakim Berndtsson (2011) have a great piece in International Political Sociology on the latter, focusing on body searches in airports for example ('Private Security and the Public–Private Divide: Contested Lines of Distinction and Modes of Governance in the Stockholm-Arlanda Security Assemblage'). Maybe that could be useful even if its not related to labor or work places?
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I am working on underwater surveillance project. I have been searching for a visual tracking benchmark for the underwater data-set but failed to find any. If anyone is aware of or working on underwater tracking, please help.
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Thank you Md. Milon Islam for the response.
The benchmark you shared is for outdoor video. I am actually seeking for some exclusive underwater video tracking benchmark...
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I'm interested in knowing until which point Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques are currently being applied in a variety of biomedical/research projects.
I'm currently managing this blog post to share the most interesting and/or promising approaches to the use of EDA techniques I come across within my monthly surveillance of the matter.
Your feedback is welcome!
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Thank you very much, Mariel.
The ViVA project sounds really promising thought I'm not able to find additional information in the web 4 years later.
Do you know if it is still running?
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There are two approaches for molecular antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance: 1.Typing-based, in which resistance is predicted by association with genotype, and 2. The direct detection of genetic markers of AMR.
If the prevalence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae is low in a city(for example 25-30 isolates during 6 month sampling), which approach is suitable for molecular AMR surveillance?
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Detecting and sequencing of AMR genes, is also an option, however that mean your selection of genes to be detected or sequenced will be based phenotypic characteristics of the isolates at MIC level. Some researcher also select the genes to be sequence based on previous history of existing resistance gene circulating within a geographical area. take for example blaCMY2 id very prevalent in North america while blaCTXM is more prevalent in Europe or bla metallo genes in Asia or India. So prior knowledge matters alot as well as phenotypic characteristics of the isolates derived from MIC reading.
If the resistance genes detected are associated with/specific to phenotypic characterictics of the isolates, and based on available information e.g. questionnaire survey or nationally collected data from routine surveillance, its possible to say frequent/continuous prescription maybe relating resistance.
Cheers
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Hi All,
I've developed an action recognition algorithm using depth action sequences. I wanna implement the algorithm in a surveillance camera which captures rgb videos. Would the algorithm be able to recognize actions regarding the data?
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Dear Saumik Bhattacharya ,
You are perfect! Thanks to Shafagat Mahmudova for your recommended sources!
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WHO’s first release of surveillance data on antibiotic resistance reveals high levels of resistance to a number of serious bacterial infections in both high- and low-income countries. Though efforts are underway, the condition is posing big challenge in the fight against infectious disease. How the scientific community and other relevant stakeholders could curb the problem.
Reflections on best experiences are appreciated,
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Antibacterial surveillance and clonal characteristics of resistance genes within your area are good tools for policy driven drug control. Effective monitoring and drug control will break the chain of spread of resistance genes vertically and horizontally among bacteria. Efforts are intensified at discovering newer antibiotics globally.
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dear fellow researchers,
I am working with person recognition in outdoor surveillance. I ve one doubt that can i use local binary pattern feature for person recognition in outdoor environments .
please let me know
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It is proved in literature that LBP features can be used for face detection and recognition. You can find rich literature for face detection.
In work [1], LBP-Haar Multi-Feature is proposed for Pedestrian Detection. You also have to consider computation cost for real time video surveillance.
hope thats help.
References:
[1] Thiyagarajan, B. V., Mayur, A., Ravina, B., & Akilesh, G. (2015, December). LBP-Haar Multi-Feature Pedestrian Detection for Auto-Braking and Steering Control System. In Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), 2015 International Conference on (pp. 1527-1531). IEEE.
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Let's fight against pollution in the Mediterranean
1- The overall objective Facilitate and unite efforts to combat marine litter in the Mediterranean Sea.
2. Specific object
Set up a platform for the control and monitoring of coastal marine areas based on the collection of local, radar and satellite information and a geographic processing model (GIS) of this information using satellite information and implementing a system surveillance based on drones. Put in place a system for sharing these results between the countries of the South and the North 3- Key words Environment, Mediterranean Sea, platform, surveillance, information gathering, GIS, satellite image, Drones.
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Hi,
could you please give some details about the roles and responsibilities of the members?
thenaks
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In order to recognize the person in surveillance environment.can we use local binary pattern feature
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Dear sriharsha,
see the following link in IEEE. This paper used Histogram of spatio temporal local binary patterns for human action recognition. Hope, this may helpful to you.
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Salmonella surveillance
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You should follow NCBI
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Surveillance data are ubiquitous in Latin American countries, but most times of poor quality. I am currently using a mixed-effects model, but should I use Poisson or Linear? I know there are a lot of alternatives for analysis of time series data but these two have the strength that they are the ones that are easier to communicate to the decision makers. Thanks in advance for your response.
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My Dear Antanis... firstly I hope all success to you in your work.
You can use some certieria to select the best regression fit by AIC, MSE, P_value ,..
With Best Wishes
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Given, two frames from a real world scenario such as a surveillance video of a street where there are pedestrians moving. I need to compare the performance of different optical flow algorithms ( Lucas-Kanade, TV-L1 [Zach et al.], Brox et al.) over these datas.
Are there any standard techniques for the evaluation of the flow vectors obtained from each when applied to this data?
(There is the middlebury evaluation for this purpose but it does not contain any real world data)
If there are no existing techniques, then, how to create a ground truth manually for such real world data?
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Take a look at this article:
From what I observed, end point error seems to be the method that is most popular currently (at least for dense optical flow).
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Hello colleges, currently I'm doing some visual surveillance project and I'm looking for a robust, low computational face detection algorithm to implement using matlab
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hi?
You can go for KLT, CamShift algorithms which are already implemented and you can get it and apply it.
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I am on the verge of preparing a protocol for evaluating the impact of a four years surveillance system on infectious disease, to proceed; I need some kind of a direction and ideas on the crucial point and steps in conducting an impact evaluation, conceptual framework, things that i need to focus/addressed and so on so forth. It would be of great help if anyone could share their experiences and ideas or even a template protocol, protocols or published papers on the same.
Thanks
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Dear Sir ...I have a lecture entitled Bio safety and Bio security..if you are interested in..let me know.
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Presumably this project involves epidemiological surveillance of targeted diseases.
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Actually Mr. Balwar is very correct in respect to the term Epidemiology, which by scientific defination is restricted to human population only but later the defination was more refined and made precise to include the diseases having zoonotic potential also means diseases shared by both man and animals as Mr. Balwar had clearly mentioned about? But for ease, in general we use both the term epidemiology and epizootiology interchangeably.
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how useful would you say genomic approaches is in this field in comparison to traditional methods used previously to identify pathogens?
Is it better for patient treatment for us to use genomic sequencing methods such as WGS/NGS? 
Does it help public health investigate outbreaks and make international surveillance easier?
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Dear Dr Ahmed
The short answer is yes. 
Genomics can be of use to identify an unknown pathogen. They can be used to trace the origin of an outbreak. They can with some difficulty be used to estimate the reproductive number. 
They can also be used to confirm/refute theories about the origins of an outbreak. C difficle is a problem in many hospitals. Although ribotyping suggested a common epidemic strain, further sequencing has shown that there are multiple strains circulating. Another example is MRSA. Although these strains have similar phage profiles, biotypes and resistance patterns there are multiple strains in circulation rather than one or two epidemic types. Finally a paper recently reported the results of an investigation into an extended beta lactam resistant Klebsiella pneumonia that has persisted for a several years. On analysis it was found that the strain had originated several years before it was detected in the hospital. 
All this having been said isolating the genome of an unknown pathogen can be difficult. This is at the moment not really sensible. Most labs are not set up to do this in real time so for the moment it seems we are stuck with the usual methods. There has been movement in this area for TB but the jury is still out on these for the moment. Inhibitors of PCR that are not allowed for in testing systems may produce false negatives or even worse false positives. All of that having been said it seems likely that these methods will become mainstream in the not too distant future. 
If urgent action is indicated the usual methods are probably the most reliable at the moment. When possible sequencing of the pathogens responsible should be done as this provides information that may be useful or even critical and cannot be obtained in any other way. For example say there is an outbreak of Salmonella at a party. Most food associated Salmonella have the same serology and phage type. While the usual methods of identification may suggest uncooked eggs (the usual suspect) legally this may be problematic given the similarities between Salmonella and the problems with growing them from the eggs days after the party. Genomic typing may even rule the eggs out as a source.
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How can I get to know the distribution pattern of polydnaviruses and their hosts?
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no my dear
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(1) what is meant by unexpected here .how to detemine the level shifted from endemic to epidemic.
(2) what is the period of surveillance needed to say that this is an outbreak ??
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Additionally a ln epidemic can occur when a disease emerged in a place it never was. Eg the re-emergence of a single case of small pox could be described as an epidemic
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I was wondering if anyone had any expertise on the fourth amendment pertaining to electronic surveillance.
Would prospective warrantless StingRay searches that track a criminal to their own private residence be constitutional. Under the public movement doctrine, public roads are arguably covered, however if we follow Karo, it states that once the tracking invades the residence of an individual it violates the fourth amendment.
Thank you,
Dr. Sartre 
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Ok thank you, I will be looking at U.S. v. Lambis and the reasoning behind it.
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The link provided http://www.cvg.cs.rdg.ac.uk/PETS2001/ANNOTATION/ is not working. The PETS (Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance) data sets are hosted by University of Reading. I trying to contact the Professors that manage the data sets but they did not reply yet.
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xml format of the ground truths is available but I don't understand how to proceed further.
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I am conducting a study into the need for echocardiogram monitoring in patients taking cabergoline for hyperprolactinaemia disorders (not Parkinson's disease). I'm interested if there are any local/national guidelines for echo surveillance that helps guide clinicians in this. 
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Hi both, Thank you for your informative answers. As you say it seems the evidence for echo monitoring in low dose cabergoline patients is limited. In Scotland echoes are done on an ad hoc basis influenced but the available SPC and society guidelines. We are currently working to standardise echo monitoring in these patients recommending low dose patients with normal CV examinations and no other risk factors would not normally require echo surveillance until a larger cumulative dose is reached 
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Dear Iman,
By evolving SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) since 2004 , it is not needed to share the origin data. Just web services of data will be shared instead. In spatial domain we use OGC services, and share the WMS services. In fact sharing data changed to sharing services of data. In this way the governmental Organizations became more interest to contribute in responding their clients requests which are related to their data.
Hope it be what you were looking for.
Best Wishes
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I trained road sign images using 1000 positive images.
and as I attaced one of an example, I can extract ROI from real scene Images so far.
I think I need to detect the arrow symbol looks like "<" ">" from the ROI(yellow bounding box) to detect road sign.
Any ideas should be welcome! Thx in advance!
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Hi Jung,
Initially, crop the area in which symbol lies i.e. particularly the area in which the required sign lies in. Extract the HOG features from the symbol in cropped region and form a feature vector. Train the classifier with the corresponding class label. Then you can test the detection/classification on test images. More the number of images involved in the training, more the accuracy of the detection/classification. HOG based handwritten alphan-numeric symbol detection and number plate detection are robust solutions similar to your problem.
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What algorithms can we use for building a stock market surveillance system that would be able to handle circuit filter, market reconstruction, insider trading, cornering etc? Can we use Business Intelligence tools like OBIEE for achieving these goals?
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US legislation
US policy
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Before Snowden it was obvious there is surveillance going on. But Snowden put it in front of everyone to see the huge scale of the operation and the tools. As a result, industry naturally wants to protect, and governments in reaction want to restrict protection. This led to some of the current issues (Apple vs. the FBI, etc.), the re-visit of safe harbor status to the US regarding EU data, and so on. The attempt of legistlation restricting industry is expected to grow.
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Any legislation amendments
additional commentary/critique on existing policy
any dialogue on upcoming policy
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Making, amending or abolishing law by the Legislaors will affect free speech and affect the image of advnced democracies. But the FOI laws shpould be amende to exclude un-restricted acess
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I need to establish an underwater surveillance system. Issues regarding that lets us discuss.
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 I wondered if anyone has tried a laser communication through water.
If it is for getting data from a camera I expect this will be a point to point link (and receiver and transmitter are stationary)?
The fundamental problem as explained above is that water acts like a conductor which  in general can be modelled as a plasma. Hence it should follow the Drude model for a plasma. The advantage however is that it is a relatively poor conductor so the plasma frequency should not be as high as that of metals. The link below suggests the plasma frequency of seawater is around 300GHz.
At frequencies above this the water should behave as a dielectric and the absorption is due to other mechanisms (e.g. free carriers) which is less that that predicted by the plasma drude model. However in practice since water is the great solvent that it is contains many impurities and the absorption curve needs to be measured. 
Doing a quick search on the internet suggests there is a huge null in absorption around 500nm (greenish blue light). 
A quick test might be to just get a green/blue laser around 500nm and measure the absorption of a water sample using an optical power meter. If you can get this to work all you need is a light modulator and you will have more bandwidth than you need.
If you know the actual plasma frequency for the type of water you have (and if it stays constant) there are lots of other interesting things you can do to overcome the classic skin depth problem. However plasma frequency is difficult to measure and you may need equipment around the 300GHz range of frequencies.
Good luck with your experiment. 
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I would like to know the impact on both sides: people's privacy and government security.
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Hi Oussama,
In terms of mass surveillance, use of metadata and the security versus privacy implications, have a look at the following papers. All are very recent and offer some insight into the dangers and benefits of mass surveillance and big data. 
Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance, snowden, and big data: capacities, consequences, critique. Big Data & Society, 1(2), 2053951714541861.
Schneier, B. (2014). Metadata= Surveillance. IEEE Security & Privacy, (2), 84-84.
Miller, K. (2014). Total Surveillance, Big Data, and Predictive Crime Technology: Privacy's Perfect Storm. J. Tech. L. & Pol'y, 19, 105.
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What are methods of surveillance in geographically scattered areas?
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1. Visual Surveillance and Monitoring (VSAM) had developed automatic video understanding technologies that enable a single human operator to monitor behaviors over complex and scattered areas. 
2. Cloud-based infiltration detection systems.
3. Molecular detection methods (viz., genotyping) of any disease producing entity over a vast geographically scattered area.
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 What is the difference between monitoring and surveillance in a health program?
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The World health defines surveillance as such:
Public health surveillance is the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice. Such surveillance can: serve as an early warning system for impending public health emergencies; document the impact of an intervention, or track progress towards specified goals; and monitor and clarify the epidemiology of health problems, to allow priorities to be set and to inform public health policy and strategies.
The definition of monitoring is more generic and seems to be used more to compare time or parallel methods to research potential things which may impact us...
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I am trying to write an algorithm for surveillance camera where it sends only changed frames(any deviations to base frame) to control centre than just simply always sending live stream. I am implementing this to save bandwidth allocated to wireless surveillance cameras.Here I am using Color histogram and Daubechies wavelet transformation. Can any one suggest any new ideas in doing this.
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The task you described in the last post actually consists of two parts: first, you need to detect if there are any new object in your frame, second you need to classify your object to understand whether this is human, vehicle or something else. For the first part alone any decent background subtraction method would fit, yoг can try something from here: https://github.com/andrewssobral/bgslibrary
The object recognition part is much more sophisticated, there is no universal recipe. Anyway, you will need some example data, extract features from detected objects and classify them using machine learning techniques. For standard tasks, like human body detection, you may try Haar Cascade based detector http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/cascade_classification.html
You may find pre-trained cascades in OpenCV distribution, also some are available on the Internet, like here http://alereimondo.no-ip.org/OpenCV/34
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I am trying to measure the effectiveness of CCTV cameras. I am now working on a study designing to look at the relationship between the use of CCTV cameras and perceived fear of crime.
I am specifically looking for a SEM study to measure the effectiveness of CCTV cameras and the influence of this on the perceptions of the public regarding the fear of crime.
Thanks in advance for your inquires
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I don’t think that you will find such a measure of the effectiveness of CCTVs ready at hand, but I will follow this question to see what materializes.
The effectiveness of CCTV lies mainly in
(1) the deterrent effect they have,
(2) the evidence they provide for post-event investigation and prosecution, and
(3) the immediate alert they can provide during a crime for timely intervention by police.
The threat of investigation and prosecution (2), and the threat of immediate stopping intervention (3) naturally motivate deterrence (1). But post-event investigation and prosecution of course provides no stopping force other than deterrence during the moments of a crime. If the CCTVs are not supervised attentively at all times, moreover, then stopping intervention (3) becomes very unlikely. It is a matter more of chance than of design in security measures.
So the main effectiveness of CCTV for immediate, timely protective security is deterrence (1). And a measure of CCTV effectiveness has to include a measure of deterrent effect. This is obviously problematic.
There has been some work on quantitative measures of deterrence in connection with deterrence through “target shifting”, when protective measures at one site bias criminals toward other sites, demonstrating a significant “force multiplier” effect of deterrence (1) when timely intervention (3) is the foremost justification for surveillance at high-security events, but this may not apply to CCTV generally, when crimes are impulsive, opportunistic, and carried out with little prior planning, and when attentive supervision of CCTV is rare.
It appears, moreover, that you ultimately want a measure of the comfort that comes to the general public from the effectiveness they subjectively attribute to each of the three mechanisms above. This subjective appreciation by the general public may of course differ significantly from the “true” effectiveness that would be more objectively be attributed to each of the three mechanisms by an analysis of the statistics of criminal inclinations and behaviour, with and without CCTV. Thus an objective measure of CCTV effectiveness may not actually serve your purpose.
Subdividing effectiveness into its three different modes acting simultaneously, and drawing a clear distinction between subjective and objective measures of effectiveness for each mode, may help progress toward an answer.
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I want to use an arduino uno +ethernet shield to monitor a surveillance camera in a remote location, create a database for the camera and light an LED at the CO (central office) to indicate fault, when factors to be monitored like power, voltage, operating temperature exceed the database created.
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Dear Ayodeji 
It will depend on how far the remote location is, that is the distance from the Camera. Is the camera a webcam, like a USB type or does it have an ethernet connection ?
Gerro
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I want to make some emperical studies on child and issues such as child mortality, immunization etc using demographic and health survey data. I can analyses dat a as I'm student of statistics. I would like if some one with knowledge of public health collaborate with me as co-oauthour in these studies.
Regards
Atta from Pakistan
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Dear Atta,
Please send your research details/proposal to my e-mail address: ebenezer2k2@gmail.com
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Using ILI cumulative summation currently. Is there another method that has proven valuable?
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Another method is to consider the dynamic of the flu: the seasons begins when the number of cases grows exponentially
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How we can use WSN in space and which type of architecture is required to integrate the WSN in space for satellite surveillance ?
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Existing WSN nodes built for operation on Earth could be not suitable for space applications: http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td2801/Maurer.pdf
It is possible that design of some CubeSat's (for example, GATOSS http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/gomx-1.htm) could be interesting as examples of space WSN nodes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262944047_ADS-B_in_Space_Decoder_Implementation_and_First_Results_from_the_GATOSS_Mission
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We are conducting a surveillance study looking at various socio-demographic factors and birth outcomes such as LBW and prematurity using birth certificate data. Given the limited info on the birth certificate, which would be a better predictor of adequate prenatal care, the Kotelchuck or the Kessner index.
 
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The Kotelchuck Index, is also called the Adequacy of Prenatal Care Utilization (APNCU) Index, It uses two crucial elements obtained from birth certificate data-when prenatal care began (initiation) and the number of prenatal visits from when prenatal care began until delivery (received services). The Kotelchuck index classifies the adequacy of initiation as  i.e pregnancy months 1 and 2, months 3 and 4, months 5 and 6, and months 7 to 9. The final Kotelchuck index measure combines these two dimensions into a single summary score. The profiles define adequate prenatal care as a score of 80% or greater on the Kotelchuck Index, or the sum of the Adequate and Adequate Plus categories.The Kotelchuck Index does not measure the quality of prenatal care.
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Are there molecular-based methods to be used in a routine laboratory for the detection of antimicrobial susceptibilities and resistances in Helicobacter pylori?
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Many thanks to Cristina, Ierardi, Amin and Andreas. 
Your helpful assistance and illustrious contributions are much appreciated.
Best Regards
Sayed
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In the wake of the Snowden leaks, the public has learned that the sheer technical scale of surveillance goes beyond what has usually been thought possible, such as a "full take" of internet communication. The picture emerges that intelligence agencies are prominent users and drivers of "big data" technology. But from the media reporting, capabilities remain rather unclear, certainly also because of the variety of different surveillance programs, the complexity of the technology, and of course secrecy.
I would like to know more about what the technologies employed are and how far technical capabilities go. Since it may be a vast topic, let me narrow the question down: I would like to learn about data analysis capabilities, not about the use of cryptology or computer security research for surveillance. The focus is on mass surveillance rather than spying on specific target persons. I am interested in efforts to make society as a whole "machine-readable" by using techniques such as data mining, machine learning, social network analysis etc.
Especially interesting are things like:
- the intent to build a comprehensive social graph of large population segments [1]
- the use of social media and other data streams to anticipate political events such as protests, civil unrest etc., e.g. [2]
Can you point to publications? Work done in the service of surveillance and contributions of computer scientists to the critical debate around the issue would be equally interesting.
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Let's kick off,
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
UTAH DATA CENTER
When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.
Besides this there are:
- The Utah Data Center, a Visitor control center.
- A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access. 2 Administrations
- Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel. With 3 Data halls
- Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers. 4 Backup generators and fuel tanks Can power the center for at least three days.
- 5 Water storage and pumping Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.
- 6 Chiller plants. About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.
7 Power substations
- An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.
8 Security
Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.
****Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan
A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a week long coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. “What I smell and taste is like coal smoke,” complained one local blogger that day. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.
A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? “Absolutely not,” he said with a self-conscious half laugh. “Nor do I want them spying on me.”
For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies.
Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. “We’ve been asked not to talk about the project,” Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.
Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
The NSA’S SPY NETWORK
Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world. Here’s how the data center appears to fit into the NSA’s global puzzle.—J.B.
SPY NETWORK
1 Geostationary satellites
Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. Onboard software acts as the first filter in the collection process, targeting only key regions, countries, cities, and phone numbers or email.
2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado
Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
Focuses on intercepts from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Codenamed Sweet Tea, the facility has been massively expanded and now consists of a 604,000-square-foot operations building for up to 4,000 intercept operators, analysts, and other specialists.
4 NSA Texas, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio
Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center.
5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole. Like the other NSA operations centers, it has since been expanded: Its 2,700 employees now do their work aboveground from a new 234,000-square-foot facility.
6 Domestic listening posts
The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic
traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations.
7 Overseas listening posts
According to a knowledgeable intelligence source, the NSA has installed taps on at least a dozen of the major overseas communications links, each capable of eavesdropping on information passing by at a high data rate.
8 Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, Utah
At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents.
9 Multiprogram Research Facility, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away here, building the world’s fastest supercomputers and working on cryptanalytic applications and other secret projects.
10 NSA headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Analysts here will access material stored at Bluffdale to prepare reports and recommendations that are sent to policymakers. To handle the increased data load, the NSA is also building an $896 million supercomputer center here.
Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says. “That’s not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.”
The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.
The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.
The software, created by a company called Narus that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.
The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.
Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)
After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.
Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.
In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.
But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.
Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”
When Barack Obama took office, Binney hoped the new administration might be open to reforming the program to address his constitutional concerns. He and another former senior NSA analyst, J. Kirk Wiebe, tried to bring the idea of an automated warrant-approval system to the attention of the Department of Justice’s inspector general. They were given the brush-off. “They said, oh, OK, we can’t comment,” Binney says.
Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.
There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe. For a 128-bit cipher, the number of trial-and-error attempts would be 340 undecillion (1036).
Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. “We questioned it one time,” says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. “Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys.” According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, “You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking.” It was a candid admission. In the long war between the code breakers and the code makers—the tens of thousands of cryptographers in the worldwide computer security industry—the code breakers were admitting defeat.
So the agency had one major ingredient—a massive data storage facility—under way. Meanwhile, across the country in Tennessee, the government was working in utmost secrecy on the other vital element: the most powerful computer the world has ever known.
The plan was launched in 2004 as a modern-day Manhattan Project. Dubbed the High Productivity Computing Systems program, its goal was to advance computer speed a thousandfold, creating a machine that could execute a quadrillion (1015) operations a second, known as a petaflop—the computer equivalent of breaking the land speed record. And as with the Manhattan Project, the venue chosen for the supercomputing program was the town of Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee, a rural area where sharp ridges give way to low, scattered hills, and the southwestward-flowing Clinch River bends sharply to the southeast. About 25 miles from Knoxville, it is the “secret city” where uranium- 235 was extracted for the first atomic bomb. A sign near the exit read: what you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. Today, not far from where that sign stood, Oak Ridge is home to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it’s engaged in a new secret war. But this time, instead of a bomb of almost unimaginable power, the weapon is a computer of almost unimaginable speed.
In 2004, as part of the supercomputing program, the Department of Energy established its Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility for multiple agencies to join forces on the project. But in reality there would be two tracks, one unclassified, in which all of the scientific work would be public, and another top-secret, in which the NSA could pursue its own computer covertly. “For our purposes, they had to create a separate facility,” says a former senior NSA computer expert who worked on the project and is still associated with the agency. (He is one of three sources who described the program.) It was an expensive undertaking, but one the NSA was desperate to launch.
Known as the Multiprogram Research Facility, or Building 5300, the $41 million, five-story, 214,000-square-foot structure was built on a plot of land on the lab’s East Campus and completed in 2006. Behind the brick walls and green-tinted windows, 318 scientists, computer engineers, and other staff work in secret on the cryptanalytic applications of high-speed computing and other classified projects. The supercomputer center was named in honor of George R. Cotter, the NSA’s now-retired chief scientist and head of its information technology program. Not that you’d know it. “There’s no sign on the door,” says the ex-NSA computer expert.
At the DOE’s unclassified center at Oak Ridge, work progressed at a furious pace, although it was a one-way street when it came to cooperation with the closemouthed people in Building 5300. Nevertheless, the unclassified team had its Cray XT4 supercomputer upgraded to a warehouse-sized XT5. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world’s fastest computer in 2009.
Meanwhile, over in Building 5300, the NSA succeeded in building an even faster supercomputer. “They made a big breakthrough,” says another former senior intelligence official, who helped oversee the program. The NSA’s machine was likely similar to the unclassified Jaguar, but it was much faster out of the gate, modified specifically for cryptanalysis and targeted against one or more specific algorithms, like the AES. In other words, they were moving from the research and development phase to actually attacking extremely difficult encryption systems. The code-breaking effort was up and running.
The breakthrough was enormous, says the former official, and soon afterward the agency pulled the shade down tight on the project, even within the intelligence community and Congress. “Only the chairman and vice chairman and the two staff directors of each intelligence committee were told about it,” he says. The reason? “They were thinking that this computing breakthrough was going to give them the ability to crack current public encryption.”
In addition to giving the NSA access to a tremendous amount of Americans’ personal data, such an advance would also open a window on a trove of foreign secrets. While today most sensitive communications use the strongest encryption, much of the older data stored by the NSA, including a great deal of what will be transferred to Bluffdale once the center is complete, is encrypted with more vulnerable ciphers. “Remember,” says the former intelligence official, “a lot of foreign government stuff we’ve never been able to break is 128 or less. Break all that and you’ll find out a lot more of what you didn’t know—stuff we’ve already stored—so there’s an enormous amount of information still in there.”
The NSA believes it’s on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm—opening up hoards of data.
That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.
But first the supercomputer must break the encryption, and to do that, speed is everything. The faster the computer, the faster it can break codes. The Data Encryption Standard, the 56-bit predecessor to the AES, debuted in 1976 and lasted about 25 years. The AES made its first appearance in 2001 and is expected to remain strong and durable for at least a decade. But if the NSA has secretly built a computer that is considerably faster than machines in the unclassified arena, then the agency has a chance of breaking the AES in a much shorter time. And with Bluffdale in operation, the NSA will have the luxury of storing an ever-expanding archive of intercepts until that breakthrough comes along.
But despite its progress, the agency has not finished building at Oak Ridge, nor is it satisfied with breaking the petaflop barrier. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.
These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
But the real competition will take place in the classified realm. To secretly develop the new exaflop (or higher) machine by 2018, the NSA has proposed constructing two connecting buildings, totaling 260,000 square feet, near its current facility on the East Campus of Oak Ridge. Called the Multiprogram Computational Data Center, the buildings will be low and wide like giant warehouses, a design necessary for the dozens of computer cabinets that will compose an exaflop-scale machine, possibly arranged in a cluster to minimize the distance between circuits. According to a presentation delivered to DOE employees in 2009, it will be an “unassuming facility with limited view from roads,” in keeping with the NSA’s desire for secrecy. And it will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated.
James Bamford (washwriter@gmail.com) is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.
Tags: crypto, cybersecurity, Data Center, NSA, paranoia, privacy, surveillance
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As specialist in IT and data security I think about increased influence of internet services, social plugins, smartphones, common data bases, cloud computing, etc. on our everday life. There is a lot of shared information which may be useful in users identification, and sometimes it may be used against us. Are we aware of it? Where is the limit of published personal data?
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I think that there is a clear distinction in principle but not in the actual state of affairs in the technology world. while mobility is one of the most treasured commodities of the actual technological trend, the devices are limited and therefore rely on a "cloud" infrastructure. The "cloud infrastructure is highly localized to several key players in the industry that control the market. This paves way to a subjugation of our private information to those players and if you do not agree with their terms then you are left out of the movement. Add to this situation that most users do not really value their privacy enough and you have a recipe for various undesired consequences.
Most users will readily give away their privacy for 5 seconds of fame, their valued mobility,added discounts and offers, among other trivial incentives to give away their privacy. This is a problem that came not with current technology but by consumerism and television.
Just a thought
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Opening question for first phase of foresight research.
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Biometric authentication are the future, 'cause is more secure than password or identification cards. Biometrics features can't be forgot or stolen so if you wanna know the applications of biometrics look around of you and in any place when you do something with a card or a pin or a password are a potential biometric application.
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This question comes about from the reading this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131111122107.htm
Advanced digital surveillance technology can help law enforcement be more efficient. But this same technology can also create mistrust within a community due to the potential of abuse and misuse. With respect to public places, where there is no expectation of privacy, should additional regulations be introduced to better balance the efficiencies and the public feeling of freedom? Or would additional regulations simply create more bureaucracy for law enforcement that would lessen the value of digital surveillance or impede their ability to protect their community?
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Though this is a rather 'political' question, except for criminologists, it is an important question, but a difficult one.
How to regulate digital surveillance (camera's, sound interception, etceteera) in public (and private) spaces. It's like trying to regulate illegal hunting.
A true and direct democracy does not need surveillance. Nevertheless in many so-called democracies, digital surveillance is all over the (public) places and spaces.
In my country you will be followed by cameras in shops, public market places and busy streets, parking lots, tunnels, banks, public administration buildings, musea, restaurants especially the expensive ones, stadions, highways, trams, buses, trains and even from space. My government detects illegal swimming pools (people have to pay taxes when they build a swimming pools, and some citizens don't like to pay taxes). Hence each year an inventory of swimming pools is made using satellite remote sensing. If the local government sees discrepancies from one year to another, you'd better pay that tax, or get a fine, whch will make you sick.
So survaillance is there and eveywhere. I am not even speaking about the private space in our societies. When go into a bank, a parking lot or a Zoo, you are entering private space. Also there surveillance is omnipresent in all its emanations. I really wonder how one can regulate surveillance, which has already grown into a jungle of applications on which no soul has a grip, especially not the government. In the jungle the only law counting is that of being hunted or hunt yousrelf.
In France a system has been established and commercialized with which one can become a member of a hunter community. In traffic a lot of cameras have been installed along busy roads to control if someone is speeding or not. The French have put up an electronic system of crowd sourcing called 'Coyote'. This system warns you where and when the police is doing mobile obervations for speeding among other types of information like traffic jams, incidents on the road etecetra. The exchange of this type of intelligence can go quite far. When you approach with your car, for example a spot observed by the traffic police in a mobile mission, your Coyote will warned you to step on your brakes. When you pass the observation spot, the system asks if the cops are still there. The answer then is yes or no. If it is yes, the member of the Coyote hunting community behind you will know that he (women don't speed) has to step on his brakes as well. When the answer is no, no need to step on the brakes. Full throttle, full speed, the German way.
What happened in France next? The French Goverment has forbidden the use of the Coyote crowd sourcing system! Yep that's democracy. You cannot become a hunter.In the other EU countries the system is not forbidden at all. In Germany it is not even used at all. Why is thta? Well, because on the 'autobahn' (highway), in many locations, there is simply no speed limit at all. Hence no need for Coyote. And when a German leaves the autobahn, German discipline takes care of it that nobody (or almost nobody) speeds on secondary roads.
This shows how complex maters of surveillance can become.
I think for regulation it is too little and too late. The only thing one can do is to exert some type of self-defence like the French did, or just be disciplined like the Germans are on places where speeding is dangerous, and go full speed, where it is not dangerous, at least not with a German car ;-). For women in traffic, strangely enough, they are dsicplined like male Germans. This must have some origin in mans evolutionary tractus. Do you understand now why I have so much respect for women?
They are in many ways the victims of manly testosteron society, also at the level of losing their privacy due to manly undisciplined behaviour and sometimes excessive violence.
Cheers,
Frank
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I'm particularly interested in it from an actual/virtual Deluezean sense, or in terms of Baudrillard's simulacrum, where the (in this instance surveillance data) is not a copy or data-double in the sense used in surveillance studies, but is truth in itself. Haven't seen anything useful, but may be looking in the wrong places...
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Have you seen the film "The Conversation" with Gene Hackman.